News stories from Saturday March 27, 1976

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

In response to a question about the allegations of bribes paid abroad by United States corporations, President Ford said that he would establish a cabinet-level commission to examine the problem. Mr. Ford told a campaign audience in La Crosse, Wis., that Elliot Richardson, Secretary of Commerce, would be the chairman of the panel. The President said that the payments were a complicated matter and that there were no easy solutions to the domestic or diplomatic problems they raised. The White House mentioned several weeks ago that the establishment of such a commission might be one way to explore the problem of payments. [New York Times] Organized labor is fighting a stubborn and sometimes camouflaged battle to retain a major political weapon: The right to spend unlimited, unreported amounts of union money in support of favored candidates. In the current debate in Congress over revising the campaign law, Republicans are trying to compel unions to report this kind of spending, how much and for whom, just as all other political spending is reported under the current disclosure law. Labor is resisting fiercely. [New York Times] Washington residents lined up by the thousands to take a free ride on the inaugural stretch of the city's new subway system. The crowds overloaded the cars and caused some delays, some for 45 minutes. Lines of curious people outside station kiosks extended for two to three blocks. On some of the crowded trains, there was spontaneous applause for the fast, smooth 4.6-mile ride from Rhode Island Avenue and Eighth Street to Connecticut Avenue and L Street N.W. The bus trip between the two points takes 28 minutes. Some of the subway trains made it in seven minutes. The fare on the Washington Metro, as it is called, will be 55 cents in rush hours and 40 cents in non-rush periods. Longer stretches of the line will be added in stages, beginning next year. By the early 1980's there will be an 86-station network extending into Maryland and Virginia. [New York Times] A scientist who was a leader in growing living human cells in the laboratory has been accused in a government investigator's report of selling valuable cell specimens that were government property. The investigator recommended that the National Institutes of Health take action to recover more than $67,000 from Dr. Leonard Hayflick who, in the meantime, has filed suit charging the N.I.H. with defamation. [New York Times] Quite often these days at the White House when a button is pushed -- be it a policy button, a political button or a bureaucratic button -- there is no response. It is clear that President Ford, after more than 18 months in office, is conducting the least potent presidency since the Eisenhower administration. But Mr. Ford does not believe that he has lost any of what he calls his "basic powers," but there has been, he says, a swing of the "historic pendulum" toward Congress, raising the possibility of a "disruptive" erosion of his ability to govern. [New York Times] Moslem and leftist forces in Lebanon were on the move on the steep, rocky slopes of the mountains east of Beirut. Though slow-moving, this was a crucial battle that might be more important than the fighting in Beirut because it was providing the leverage that Kamal Jumblat, the Moslem leftist leader, was using in Damascus as he sought to obtain the resignation of President Suleiman Franjieh. Mr. Jumblat was also seeking much more far-reaching constitutional reforms than the Christian conservatives have been willing to concede. [New York Times] The Egyptian government has begun an almost frantic search for equipment to maintain its Soviet-made arms and for new sophisticated weapons to replace Russian equipment. President Anwar Sadat will visit West Germany, France, Italy and Yugoslavia to discuss arms purchases, and Egyptian officials have begun talks in London on the possible purchase of Chieftain tanks and new engines for the Soviet T-62 tanks now in the Egyptian forces. Egyptian sources in Washington said that the new arms were needed to maintain a military balance in the Middle East. They believe that Israeli military procurement in the United States has shifted the balance in Israel's favor despite the continuing delivery of Soviet arms to Syria. [New York Times] "My husband is so happy over the coup that he's going to pay taxes for the first time," said the wife of an agricultural machinery contractor at a dinner party in Buenos Aires on the first weekend after Argentina's military coup. The collapse of the Peronist government gave a special glow to one of the sumptuous parties that make upper-class Argentines the social lions of Latin America. [New York Times]